This is either really excellent or really horrible news for users of the popular musical selfie app, Eyegroove. The app is apparently closing its doors, with most of its staff “joining Facebook to work on new experiences for people to create, share, and connect”.
In a statement posted on their website, Eyegroove notified users that “after two years of daily delight in our users’ beautiful Grooves, we are shutting down our app.” The news comes 5 days after Facebook announced it was acquiring the app for an undisclosed amount. TechCrunch reported that this move wasn’t done for a specific technology that Eyegroove had, but rather it was “more about bringing in talent who can help with the development of more creative tools on the site, but not necessarily those that would be a direct answer to Musical.ly.”
The app has since been removed from the American iOS store, but tech-savvy users can still find a web cache snapshot of the German Eyegroove listing to find out what Eyegroove was all about. Working closely with SoundCloud, users could create 19 second video selfies on Eyegroove where they could then add “high quality effects and music to anything in your camera roll,” being able to choose “from millions of songs” thanks to SoundCloud music licensing.
Users could then share their creations, known as “Grooves,” with a large community of users and find and view other Grooves. There were also filters available that could be applied to your Grooves creations prior to saving and sharing.
Eyegroove had received $3.5 million in funding, and CEO Scott Snibbe had labeled the service as an “Instagram for interactive music.”, but had since been overshadowed by Musical.ly. Scott Snibbe is no stranger to startups and working with big-name clients, with his 2007 San Francisco augmented reality and natural user interface studio Snibbe Interactive having worked with clients like James Cameron, Björk, and Disney, among others.